Colorado Batman Massacre

Twenty-four-year-old James Holmes left different impressions on people he encountered in life. At the University of California, Riverside, where he graduated with honors in neuroscience in 2010, he's remembered as brilliant.

"He was an honor student, so academically he was at the top of the top," University Chancellor Tim White said at a press conference. "He really distinguished himself from an academic point of view during his four years with us, graduating with highest honors."

But back in the northern suburbs of San Diego, where Holmes grew up, friends came and went from his house all day. His father, surrounded by police, left for Denver early Friday morning.]

Interesting that these shooters are exclusively the quiet, marginalized, white male, aspergers nerd types. I wonder how long it is going to take for the media to find his manifesto and start a witch hunt over its contents.

Entertainment takes over so real life takes a back seat. Loss of girlfriend, check. Loss of apartment, meaning low or little income due to fun seeking, check. Reality then comes crashing down on solitary entertainment land so one guy snaps, then many lives are ruined.

Entertainment takes over so real life takes a back seat. Loss of girlfriend, check. Loss of apartment, meaning low or little income due to fun seeking, check. Reality then comes crashing down on solitary entertainment land so one guy snaps, then many lives are ruined.

Chicken or the egg? Could be schizoid personality disorder or any other number of things. When playing something to that extent is clearly not about entertainment or fun anymore because its fucking boring to play the same shit over and over again. Its just compulsive or obsessive escapism.

Also lol at the victims parents crying about how their kid could have beat him up without effort.

Entertainment takes over so real life takes a back seat. Loss of girlfriend, check. Loss of apartment, meaning low or little income due to fun seeking, check. Reality then comes crashing down on solitary entertainment land so one guy snaps, then many lives are ruined.

and the final irony is when entertainment turns around and defines you - although wrongfully in this case since I don't recall an iteration of The Joker with red hair - as a cartoon character

He might have confused the fast food clown with the comic book one. Can a schizophrenic really successfully pursue a doctorate? Maybe a small constellation of stressors including the health effects of self-neglect over the months while gaming constantly caused the latent disorder to kick in.

e.g.

Quote

7. Psychosis and Hallucinations

Psychosis and both audio and visual hallucinations can occur at the advanced stages of a vitamin B12 deficiency.

This guy is an obvious nutjob who killed innocent albiet moronic people for no apparent reason. If nothing else, his deeds will function as an example of societal decay firstly in the sense that a citizen (of any country) can shoot their own people and secondly in that the rest of society will identify him as an external force to be done away with rather than acknowledge it as the sickness within.

It seems like any dissenting ideology that wants to have any popular credibility simply cannot be linked with violence. People like Breivik, McVeigh and Kaczynski are well above average intelligence and have their hearts in the right place but have done themselves and their beliefs a great disservice by resorting to violence, forever being associated with guys like this.

It seems like any dissenting ideology that wants to have any popular credibility simply cannot be linked with violence.

Because theres always the underlying assumption that the killer is just projecting his internal problems onto a social or political context. This guy is probably more intelligent than Breivik or McVeigh but made the arbitrary choice to skip pulling a manifesto out of his ass.

Does a happy person give a shit that society is garbage? Probably not enough to commit suicide.

Mostly the only types of dissenting ideology that can win over the crowd are ones that feed off the peoples resentment/anger towards a given object.

It seems like any dissenting ideology that wants to have any popular credibility simply cannot be linked with violence.

Because theres always the underlying assumption that the killer is just projecting his internal problems onto a social or political context. This guy is probably more intelligent than Breivik or McVeigh but made the arbitrary choice to skip pulling a manifesto out of his ass.

I think these guys at least had a point and I was particularly surprised by how articulate and well composed Breivik was in court. Needless to say people can't be convinced by use of force, thus the attacks were mostly counter-productive.

With James Holmes, I doubt if he would even have anything to write a manifesto about. He's intelligent sure, but intelligence is useless without practical application to a worldview.

Does a happy person give a shit that society is garbage? Probably not enough to commit suicide.

Lol... is this a trick question? If society is garbage then I doubt if a person could be truly happy. Of course we don't want to be too dramatic about this as things haven't completely fallen apart, though there are evident problems.

Lol... is this a trick question? If society is garbage then I doubt if a person could be truly happy.

Its a matter of perception - but human perception is unstable.

Self awareness leads to a perspective bias by the thinker that assumes all his feelings, ideas, memories and personality traits are his own and that there is a solid and static foundation for them. This really doesn't seem to be the case at all. The chemical balance in your brain at any given point changes not only your perception and interpretation of new input but also how old data is reinterpreted as its being recalled. As an experiment you can force yourself into a chemically induced depression through massive sleep deprivation and then try to recall recent positive experiences. The mind will latch onto even the most minor negative aspects of the experience and massively inflate their significance. The entire emotional context surrounding the experience will change and the memory will have permanently mutated. When you recall the same experience later in a normal state of mind the emotional aspect becomes ambiguous.

Humans normally don't internalize any problems outside of their small social sphere - all the problems come from within. If you have 1-5 dogs you'd probably name each one of them and become emotionally attached to them. If you have 50-100 dogs in your back yard it just becomes "those god damn fucking dogs in the back yard". There are soft limits (which varies among different types of primates) on the number of entities that you can form meaningful bonds with.

A human's social sphere tends to be very limited in scope. If you have people within it that aren't garbage there is no real reason to _emotionally_ care if the rest of humanity is fucking retarded. You may care out of principle or based on some logical argument but that type of shit does not lead to a huge emotional response in itself - although it does have an impact to a certain extent.

Life (and society as extension) can arbitrarily feel great or like a living nightmare based off the composition of some goo sloshing around your brain. Experiencing these types of loose shifts in perception leads to a type of emotional detachment from them that facilitates clearer thinking - not only should you question what other people tell you but what your own mind is telling itself.

Its all too easy to assume the sky is falling when in reality its you who is dysfunctional. On the flip side: people who are naturally always carefree/happy tend to be completely oblivious to potential problems.

This sounds more like an argument against the possibility of altruism.

Some people think the sky is falling down. Some people don't care, while others think things have never been better. One end of the spectrum defines the other. But I often think it's possible that the world is infinitely more beautiful and horrible than most of us realize, of course we like to pick sides as we find ourself within and not outside of the stream of life.

If a person can experience happiness at the expense of another, perhaps what then matters is the health of that happiness.

Coincidence? From the closing ceremony of the Olympics: (info from The Copycat Effect)

Interestingly, Colorado can also mean red in Spanish. The director who commited suicide recently directed a movie called Red Tide. Another famous director also commited suicide very recently.

PS: The fact that the suicide directed "Red Tide" does not mean much to me but coincidence, but the suicides, the shooting and the olympics photos, and the fact that the joker has green hair, are interesting.